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Support from adult children is vital for the wellbeing of many older adults and geographic nearness of children can be crucial for managing activities in daily life, even in countries with a universal welfare model and especially in the current times of refamilization of care and support. Hence, trends of convergence and divergence in intergenerational distances will influence the possibilities to receive informal assistance. Based on Swedish register data, we examined the proximity to the nearest adult child for the period 1990 to 2019, for parents at age 65 and 80 across socioeconomic groups, genders, and region types, using multivariate analyses. Although we found a slight overall trend towards divergence for parents aged 65 over the three decades, we do not interpret this as a constant long-term trend, but rather as part of short-term variations across cohorts, with longer distances for the baby-boom generation born in the 1940s. We found longer distances for fathers, singles, high-income individuals, the well-educated and in rural regions. And we found trends towards longer distances in rural regions and among parents with only primary education. Although more than 80% of parents have adult children within daily reach, many older parents have their children far away. When adding the childless, we conclude that almost a third of people aged 80 have no adult child within daily reach, which is a challenge as population ages. The results are discussed in relation to the changing role of family members for care and support.

 Informal support from adult children is crucial for many older individuals as their need for assistance increases. This makes older people without children, or with children living far away, particularly vulnerable—especially when public care and support institutions are being scaled back or during times of crisis. This paper draws on data from the most recent waves of SHARE: Wave 8, the SHARE Corona Survey 1, and Wave 9, to examine both informal and professional help received by individuals aged 70 and above in 26 European countries, before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. We estimated the likelihood of receiving informal and professional help from outside the household, comparing parents living with adult children, parents with children living nearby, parents with children living far away, and older individuals without children. We also compared countries with different welfare models. The results show that many individuals over the age of 70 still manage independently. However, nearly one-third of respondents in Wave 9 reported receiving informal help from outside the household, with adult children being the primary providers—even in countries with universal welfare models. As expected, the probability of receiving help was higher among parents with adult children living nearby. However, the difference between older individuals without children and those with children living far away was relatively small. This suggests that older people in Europe without children, as well as those whose children live at a distance, constitute vulnerable groups—particularly if trends toward re-familization continue. Furthermore, we found no evidence that the dramatic increase in informal help during the pandemic had a lasting impact on how such support is provided in the post-pandemic period.

Counterurban migration is known to be driven by lifestyle motivations, in which employment considerations are more of an enabling factor than a driver. In this paper, the self-reported motives, along with labour-market and lifestyle outcomes, of counterurban migration are investigated. The focus is on trade-offs between work-related and lifestyle-related amenities for different subgroups based on recent survey data in Sweden collected from families with children in 2018–2019 who left metropolitan regions. The key results indicate that, overall, counterurban movers are satisfied with their decision and the majority cite the importance of lifestyle amenities over work-related amenities. Our conclusion is that, besides voluntary trade-offs, counterurban migration does not necessarily pose a trade-off between labour-market and lifestyle-related amenities since, to a large extent, individuals reported better outcomes in both areas. This study makes two contributions. Firstly, the data considers self-reported outcomes, including labour-market outcomes beyond income and lifestyle outcomes. Secondly, we explore individual characteristics of counterurban migrants in relation to post-migration outcomes in different destinations.

We explore staying and migration behaviour using a multigenerational perspective on local ties. Based on Swedish register data, we take a shared birthplace between young adults and one or more of their parents and grandparents as a proxy for multigenerational local ties in the young adult's birthplace. Our aim is to investigate whether the presence of this type of longstanding, multigenerational local ties in the birthplace increases one's propensity to stay or return there during young adulthood. Using multinomial logistic regressions, we model the residential trajectories between ages 18 and 30 of individuals born in 1981, 1982, and 1983 who lived in their birthplace at age 18 (i.e., stayed in, moved from, or returned to the birthplace by age 30; N = 185,897). We find that the propensity for staying in one's birthplace increases with each additional parent or grandparent with whom the birthplace is shared. Overall, differences between ties shared with parent(s) and grandparent(s) are surprisingly similar, except ties that are shared with both parents. These have a particularly strong and positive effect. Although men seem to be tied more strongly than women to their fathers and paternal grandparents, we found no differences between men and women in their ties to mothers and maternal grandparents.

This paper examines counterurban migration among young families with children in Sweden and the extent to which these moves reflect return migration, recognising the role of family members and family roots at the destination from a life course perspective. Drawing on register data for all young families with children leaving the Swedish metropolitan areas during the years 2003–2013, we analyse the pattern of counterurban moves and explore how the families’ socioeconomic characteristics, childhood origins, and links to family networks are associated with becoming a counterurban mover and choice of destination. The results show that four out of ten counterurban movers are former urban movers who choose to return to their home region. Among them, almost all have family at the destination, indicating that family ties are important for counterurban migration. In general, urban residents with a background outside metropolitan areas are much more likely to become counterurban movers. Families’ previous residential experiences during childhood, particularly in rural areas, are found to be associated with the residential environment they choose to resettle in when leaving the big city. Counterurban movers making a return move are similar to other counterurban movers in relation to employment status, but tend to be better off economically and move longer distances than other counterurban movers.

The number of national reference populations that are whole-genome sequenced are rapidly increasing. Partly driving this development is the fact that genetic disease studies benefit from knowing the genetic variation typical for the geographical area of interest. A whole-genome sequenced Swedish national reference population (n = 1000) has been recently published but with few samples from northern Sweden. In the present study we have whole-genome sequenced a control population (n = 300) (ACpop) from Västerbotten County, a sparsely populated region in northern Sweden previously shown to be genetically different from southern Sweden. The aggregated variant frequencies within ACpop are publicly available (DOI 10.17044/NBIS/G000005) to function as a basic resource in clinical genetics and for genetic studies. Our analysis of ACpop, representing approximately 0.11% of the population in Västerbotten, indicates the presence of a genetic substructure within the county. Furthermore, a demographic analysis showed that the population from which samples were drawn was to a large extent geographically stationary, a finding that was corroborated in the genetic analysis down to the level of municipalities. Including ACpop in the reference population when imputing unknown variants in a Västerbotten cohort resulted in a strong increase in the number of high-confidence imputed variants (up to 81% for variants with minor allele frequency < 5%). ACpop was initially designed for cancer disease studies, but the genetic structure within the cohort will be of general interest for all genetic disease studies in northern Sweden.

In this article, we combine the extensive literature on the analysis of life-course trajectories as sequences with the literature on causal inference and propose a new matching approach to investigate the causal effect of the timing of life-course events on subsequent outcomes. Our matching approach takes into account pre-event confounders that are both time-independent and time-dependent as well as life-course trajectories. After matching, treated and control individuals can be compared using standard statistical tests or regression models. We apply our approach to the study of the consequences of the age at retirement on subsequent health outcomes, using a unique data set from Swedish administrative registers. Once selectivity in the timing of retirement is taken into account, effects on hospitalization are small, while early retirement has negative effects on survival. Our approach also allows for heterogeneous treatment effects. We show that the effects of early retirement differ according to preretirement income, with higher income individuals tending to benefit from early retirement, while the opposite is true for individuals with lower income.

Whereas the significance of family networks for support and well‐being has been shown in previous research, few studies have analysed the income distribution within family networks. The aim of this study is to examine income distribution within family networks and how they have changed over time for women and men in different parts of the income distribution and if the incomes are more similar in the geographically proximate family network. The analysis is based on register data and by use of ordinary least squares (OLS) and quantile regressions. The results indicate that men in the lowest income group tend to have become more similar to their family network over time. Gender differences have decreased, possibly as an effect of women's higher labour market participation rate leading to decreased income disparity. This paper contributes by highlighting how the uneven distribution of economic resources in family networks adds to individual's own resources.

This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing revitalisation of the counterurbanisation research within population geography by nuancing counterurban migration beyond the rural–urban dichotomy, including all moves downwards in the urban hierarchy. The focus is to explore counterurban migration patterns among families with children leaving Swedish metropolitan areas, and whether some groups of skilled professions are more likely to make a counterurban move than others. Using register data on all families moving out from metropolitan areas in Sweden during the period 2003–2013, we found a small but steady outflow of families, mainly to medium-sized or small towns. The highly educated are overrepresented among these families, thus providing potential for an inflow of competence to the receiving areas. Contrary to expected, the assumed flexibility in time and space among knowledge sector professionals does not seem to enable them more than others to pursue counterurban moves. Instead, public sector professionals characterise families making a counterurban move to all destination regions, while men with a profession within arts and crafts to a higher extent move with their family to more rural areas.

Young adult internal migration forms a large share of the influx of people into largecities in the developed world. We investigate the role of the residential locations ofsiblings for young adults’ migration to large cities, using the case of Sweden and itsfour largest cities: Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö/Lund, and Uppsala. We use registerdata for the full Swedish-born population of young adults aged 18–28 living in Swedenin the years 2007–2013 and multinomial logistic regression analyses of migrating toeach of the four cities or migrating elsewhere versus not migrating. Our point ofdeparture is the paving-the-way hypothesis, which posits that young adults who havea sibling living at a migration destination are particularly likely to move to thatdestination, more so than to other destinations. Additional hypotheses are related tohaving more than one sibling in the city and to the gender of siblings living at thedestination. We find support for the paving-the-way hypothesis and an additional effectfor having more than one sibling in the city. Having a sibling of the same gender in acity matters more for moving there than having a sibling of the opposite gender.